Recently, well-known industrial-grade 3D printer manufacturer SLM Solutions announced that the company uses its powerful SLM280HL 3D printer to print out one of the largest ever 3D print metal objects. This is a titanium metal component, the size of 12.21 × 8.74 × 8.66 inches (about 310 × 222 × 220 mm).

According to Xi, SLM Solutions is headquartered in Lübeck, Germany, is a leading supplier of metal 3D printing systems, and its 3D printers are mainly used in aerospace, energy, medical and automotive industries. In recent years, the company's sales growth is very rapid, excellent performance also attracted the attention of several industrial giants. Last month, GE announced a $ 1.4 billion acquisition of SLM and its Swedish rival Arcam.

Nevertheless, SLM Solutions still does not stop moving forward. Today, the company is starting to experiment with how to make the most of its building board. To know that this is quite difficult, because the greater the metal 3D printing object, the more the problem. In particular, materials such as titanium, because it has a high residual stress, so the 3D print object has always been the risk of cracking. How to solve these problems has been the current metal 3D printing technology to face the biggest challenge, SLM's application engineer Mike Hansen said.

At the same time, metal 3D printing speed is very slow. It is worth mentioning that this SLM280HL 3D printer without any interference in the case of 3D printing this 12.21 × 8.74 × 8.66 inch large titanium metal body "only" for 6 days and a half time. "In fact, our equipment can run for such a long time without cleaning or any disruption, itself is very amazing." Hansen said.

In fact, this component itself is not particularly complicated. But in such a short period of time 3D printing such a large size of things, is unprecedented things. According to Hansen, this is entirely due to the powerful features of the SLM280HL 3D printer. Its dual laser device creates an overlapping area that enables faster build speeds. Tests have shown that this overlap does not have any effect on quality.

It is understood that this 3D printing of the aircraft body is developed for a customer, the customer wants to explore the 3D printing to reduce the weight, cost savings and the possibility of time. Now the result seems to be entirely satisfying. "The size of this part means that it takes a few weeks to complete with traditional processing, and it takes a four to five times to take into account it, which is a costly process, and if it is to be cast The time is even longer, taking into account the need to build molds, this time may be up to 6 months, and the traditional mold is also very expensive. "Application development, metallurgy scientist Richard Grylls. "Our 3D print speed is much faster, but the cost is higher, but it is still worth the cost of such a big key component, given the total time saved."

Hansen further revealed that they are also studying new methods for quality testing of such aerospace (or automotive) components and want to use them for highly regulated industries where extensive material and parametric testing are normal. For example, the detection requirements for aerospace products are ubiquitous, and these tests usually involve CT scans, a non-destructive test method that is used to check the porosity or voids of a component. In addition, customers can also carry out destructive testing. "We will first perform a non-destructive test on the part and then perform a real world test that will install it on the engine according to its intended use and run it until it is broken," Hansen said.

It is reported that so far, the field of aerospace has only used 3D printing technology for the manufacture of small parts, so the emergence of larger metal 3D printing components must be the technology in the field more widely used paved the way.

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